This summer, my department is in the midst of an organizational transition, as we move from a traditional, disciplinary-bound reference department to a “Teaching & Learning” team. I’m excited to undertake this work alongside some really amazing colleagues (and you can bet your buttons that we’ll be writing and presenting on this process in the future), but this context is (for now) only to set the stage for why I’m thinking about the question in the title of this post.

As I’ve been thinking about what a library department of teaching and learning looks like, I’ve been considering what makes someone a teachinglibrarian (as opposed to a librarian who happens to teach, or a teacher, or some other category of educator). What are the qualities that are unique to this group of professionals, that position us to engage in the work of information literacy instruction?

I started by looking at ACRL’s recently released Roles and Strength of Teaching Librarians, which is pretty useful for thinking about qualities that teaching librarians need to have in order to be successful in their work. There’s a nifty little graphic in the report that shows the various roles that a teaching librarian may need to embody:

Hats off to the committee who put together this report, as it’s helped me to think through goals for a teaching and learning department, and areas where we might need to grow. I certainly self-identify with most (if not all) of these roles, but it still didn’t really help me get at the librarian part of the teaching librarian equation. Basically, if my professional identity is about being a librarian (hint: it is), then how can I view my role and strengths as an educator more explicitly through that lens?

After sitting with this for a few weeks, I’ve come up with a few thoughts on what the specific strengths of teaching librarians might be, and I’d love to hear your ideas too.

We understand the organization of information and hierarchies of knowledge. Basically, this is the bread-and-potatoes of the library school curriculum, and I’d argue the most important part of having an MLS. All those cataloging and metadata classes? Those ideas are transferable across disciplines, which means that we can usually figure out how information is structured in any given database (with enough time) and help people find the stuff they need with a little librarian magic. Sometimes, even people immersed in a discipline don’t quite understand how or why information is organized in these repositories. Shedding a light on that is what we do.

We understand the pedagogy of research. On a broad level, we understand what goes into the research process across a variety of disciplines. Librarians contributing to a reference service or leading library instruction have seen hundreds of research assignments–some excellent, some not-so-good. After a few years on the job, we can spot assignment pitfalls from a mile away, because we’ve seen how a large number of people approach this process. I’d argue that even if we don’t have formal pedagogical training, most librarians have some sense of what works and what doesn’t in student research assignments. The challenge is to tease out that knowledge and apply it to our work as educational partners.

We’re really good at asking questions about things we know very little about. A.K.A. the reference interview. Most people don’t have this skill, because it’s uncomfortable to admit that you don’t know about something and ask a zillion questions to get to the precise knowledge you need to help someone find what they are looking for. But that’s what we are trained to do as reference librarians, and we can put that skill to work in thinking about consulting on research assignments, which could lead to interesting opportunities involving the collections, or a more scaffolded assignment structure, or something equally exciting. Bonus: This is also a student-centered approach, because students might be nervous or afraid to ask questions about something that’s unclear in a research assignment, but we can use our positionality to ask those “stupid questions.”

We continually bring a beginner’s mind to our work. Again, because that’s the basis for reference. Librarians are trained not to make assumptions, and we can use that same mindset for approaching research assignments, thinking about what students might already know (and what might be confusing), etc.

Of course, we also have idiosyncratic expertise in research tools, disciplinary knowledge, etc. based on our individual unique experiences, and I want to acknowledge those as well.

The more I think about it, the more I think that reference experience (or perhaps a general ethos of reference?) is crucial for the role of teaching librarian. I don’t know that we have to “do” reference, but many of the ideas and approaches that we cultivate in that sphere seem entirely important for teaching work.

What do you think? Are there other things that you would add to this list?

6 responses to “What Does It Mean to be a Teaching Librarian?”

Hi Dani, Forgive me if you have already thought of these things. How about you & your colleagues exploring your personal pedagogies? You could then apply it to the equivalent of your “general” practice. With everyone in your section doing it, you may very well come up with some approaches/perspectives/dispositions & practical knowledge that individuals didn’t realise they had or the group didn’t realise was operating in its midst. To help you explore from a client perspective, you might also have great insights lurking in the learner, academic & librarian presage analysis (I’m sorry I haven’t read your book so I don’t know what you call the presage part of your planning process) when you create your info lit learning opportunities. A fabulous journey ahead for you & your colleagues. I look forward to reading upcoming posts on your experiences & reflections 🙂 Sandra

Thanks, as always, for reading and commenting! When I first started about a year ago, I led an exercise for all of our public service librarians in writing a teaching philosophy, but your suggestion actually makes me think that it would be great to do again once the new department is formed, and use them to write a larger teaching philosophy for our department. Thanks so much for the idea!

I also have to admit that I’m not familiar with “presage analysis”–could you tell me a little more about what that entails, or if it might be called something else as well?

Hi Dani, I call it “presage” as it was Biggs’ 3 P Model (1989) that got me doing it 10 or 11 years ago. Before that it was something that I considered in more of a subconscious way. Presage is just the things that learners & teachers bring to a learning situation (eg. info lit session or online resource). I added academics as so much of my info lit work was situated in the coursework context. The analysis of those three helped inform pedagogy & content. Student presage might include things like: so many students with family & work commitments would be getting to study activities after a full day’s work & the kids were in bed which meant I needed to keep in mind that they would be tired, a lot of students would tell me “We’re not readers, we do maths” which was reflected in how I set up activities requiring reading or the proportion of students who struggled a bit with English language skills, the discipline of the students (teaching engineering students is different from teaching nursing students is different from teaching urban planning students because they are taught differently). Teacher presage might include things like I had to have enough time to develop & run several face-to-face sessions for the on-campus cohort plus create an online learning activity for the online students & there wasn’t twice the amount of time & other resources to create sound learning opportunities just because we had to work with both, for many students this would be the one & only time that I would have an opportunity to work with them so it had to create good learning outcomes & set students up for ongoing engagement with the library. Academic presage often revolved around how the academic considered that s/he would work with the librarian around discipline learning & info lit learning or how the learning opportunities that I created linked to professional competencies that were particularly important in a course.

So, now I’m guessing that you have another name for this part of the planning process 🙂 If you want to read the original paper, I think that it is this one – http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0729436890080102 A quick & dirty search with Google will find practical 3P model resources produced by various learning & teaching support depts. of universities around the world.

Thanks again for the interesting & thought provoking posts on your blog!! Sandra

Thank you so much for all of the info! I’m definitely going to look into this–we talk about connecting to people’s previous experiences in our book, which seems similar, but sounds like there is more included in this model. Will definitely dig into this literature, and thanks again for reading!